3 ways to improve your advancement ROI

Your advancement team likely has goals to acquire more donors, grow average gift amounts, and more in the year ahead. But another way to generate better results is to improve your advancement ROI. By doing so, you can make each dollar spent on advancement activities go even further.

Here, we share three ways to get a better return on investment for your advancement department’s time and money.

Convert one-time to recurring donors

Much of the investment made by advancement and alumni relations teams goes towards stewardship. This includes everything from the daily calls to alumni, meetings with prospective donors, and digital marketing campaigns.

One way to generate more ROI in the year ahead is to push for more recurring gifts. Since the effort and funds are already being committed to engage donors, encouraging them to contribute monthly instead of just once can create a much bigger overall return.

Of course, not every donor is a great candidate for a recurring gift. They may be in a better position to give a significant one-time donation, which is why it’s important to use segmentation.

Effectively segment your supporters

Beyond finding the right supporters for one-time or recurring gifts, there is a lot to gain through effective segmentation. With quality data tracking and reporting in your donor management solution, you can focus your efforts on those most likely to participate in each campaign. That helps you reduce wasted time and spending, thus improving your return on investment.

For example, you can use segmentation to zone in on alumni who were part of certain clubs or programs. Or, those who have gone onto work in certain regions or industries. Once you have done so, you can make sure that you share relevant communications only. This will save your team’s resources and increase the odds that the alumni is compelled to give.

Automate your common processes

The third way to generate more return on investment is to take advantage of automation. A donor management system like Causeview gives you many tools to automate tasks, all of which can save time and money, and improve results.

For example, you can setup automatic reminders that help you make deadlines and delight donors. You can automate thank you emails and receipting, so that no manual effort is needed to quickly and accurately confirm gifts. You can also automate reports and dashboards that provide the insights you need. Plus, you’ll gain trust that recurring gift payments will automatically be processed each month.

Doing so will give you more time for one-on-one donor outreach, planning, strategizing and other tasks that will let you grow revenue in addition to reducing costs.

Causeview Advancement can help you improve your ROI

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